Q&A With Bill Mensch (Co-Creator of the 6502)

[BigEd]

From the IEEE, a fairly short read ("This interview had been condensed and edited for clarity.")

• Q&A With Co-Creator of the 6502 Processor (Bill Mensch on the microprocessor that powered the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64)

Two notable notes:
- Apple had some input on the spec of the VIA
- the VIA is presently WDC's best selling chip

[BigEd]

Here's an hour and a half, Stephen Edwards at VCF West 2021 interviewing Bill Mensch:
Bill Mensch — Genesis and Evolution of the 6502 Family

Previously:
Bill Mensch and other 6502 talks at VCF West (2020)

And a written interview from 1986:
Bill Mensch – The Brains Behind The Brains
(via this thread)

[rpiguy2]

Bill Mensch is a keynote speaker at this years VCF East. I see no indication that this is a virtual keynote, so I look forward to meeting him in person at the event.

https://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage- ... dule-2021/

[BigDumbDinosaur]

rpiguy2 wrote:

Bill Mensch is a keynote speaker at this years VCF East. I see no indication that this is a virtual keynote, so I look forward to meeting him in person at the event.

https://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage- ... dule-2021/

It would be interesting to meet the father of the 65C02 and 65C816, as well ex-Commodorian Bil Herd. However, all the gold in Fort Knox wouldn't be enough to convince me to embed myself in a crowd crammed into an auditorium. And don't even get me started on flying...

BTW, Terry Holdt's daughter has done an excellent job gathering historical stuff related to the development of the 6502.

[Alarm Siren]

Thank you! T'was an interesting read, I am always fascinated by the history of these chips.

BigEd wrote:

- the VIA is presently WDC's best selling chip

Which makes sense when you think about it, really. Virtually any 6502-based system is going to contain one or more VIAs, and (with a bit of glue logic) you can use VIAs in other 8-bit systems. Conversely, CPUs in a system could be 6502s, 65816s, one of the various microcontrollers... and they'll rarely if ever contain more than one. As for the ACIA... given the bug, why anyone buy it boggles the mind!

[GARTHWILSON]

Alarm Siren wrote:

As for the ACIA... given the bug, why anyone buy it boggles the mind!

I might, as there are good workarounds, especially GaBuZoMeu's at viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5482&p=66433#p66433 which works regardless of clock speed and data rate. I'm more likely to use the 14-pin MAX3100 interfaced by SPI though.

[drogon]

Alarm Siren wrote:

As for the ACIA... given the bug, why anyone buy it boggles the mind!

While the Tx bug is somewhat irritating, If you have a VIA and the ACIA, then it's relatively easy to have the transmit code write the byte then set T1 in the VIA for the timeout which you can either poll or use to generate an interrupt. It's not perfect but providing a good workaround in a system I'm currently developing...

-Gordon

[Alarm Siren]

Oh yes absolutely, you can do work arounds, but unless your working under some kind of external constraints that force you to use an ACIA, I don't understand why one would choose to use it when there are other, better, non-buggy UARTs readily available. Regardless I think this is going off-topic.

[GARTHWILSON]

Here's another interview with Bill Mensch, at the Vintage Computer Festival East, Oct 9, 2021
Western Design Center: How Telephones turned into the 65C02, and the 65C816 story — Bil Mensch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqAQTl0s8A
There were plenty of interesting things there I had not heard in other interviews.

The sound cut out briefly quite a few times in the first 27 minutes, and then Mensch was apparently alerted to the fact that his wireless mic transmitter needed to be positioned differently to get a better signal to the receiver in the back of the room, so he put it on the table, and the sound never cut out again.